13 March 2009

Citrix is working with Tesco to virtualise 1,500 physical servers on XenServer, including 80 XenApp servers

Tesco, a leading British supermarket chain, has made pioneering updates to its mission-critical real time sales (RTS) systems, virtualising key business applications with Citrix XenServer running on HP ProLiant BL680c G5 Blade Servers.

The Microsoft Windows XP-based solution has enabled Tesco to increase its RTS capacity by 75 per cent, handling 1,500 sales-related messages per second – catering to the critical nature of the RTS systems and creating room for growth. This is a major milestone in Tesco’s plans to virtualise its entire server infrastructure.

“After conducting a major evaluation of virtualisation providers, we went with Citrix based on the strength of the Xen technology, the ability XenServer has to provide high levels of performance for heavy duty 64-bit applications, its licensing model and its UK-based engineering team – decisions that have already paid off for us,” said Nick Folkes, IT director at Tesco. “The virtualised RTS environment uses less than half of the energy of the physical bare metal equivalents, which supports our CO2 targets and means we have already saved a significant amount on our electricity bills. We’re running far more efficiently and the ongoing management of the environment is much simpler. While our primary goal in working with Citrix and HP was to create a more flexible IT infrastructure, the consolidation benefits are significant.”

We’re running far more efficiently and the ongoing management of the environment is much simpler

Nick Folkes, Tesco Citrix is working closely with Tesco to virtualise 1,500 physical servers on XenServer, including 80 Citrix XenApp servers. This is already bringing greater efficiencies to the way applications are delivered to each Tesco store. Tesco is aiming for a conservative 10:1 consolidation ratio for physical to virtual servers and is hitting 70 per cent central processing unit use on the servers, versus the previous six per cent. From an operational perspective, Tesco has been able to use the XenMotion live migration feature of XenServer to migrate virtual machines to other physical hardware, with zero downtime, allowing patches and updates without disrupting users.

“RTS is a mission-critical system for Tesco with very high throughput of transactions based on Microsoft IIS, BizTalk and SQL, so it requires the highest standards in processing power,” said John Glendenning, vice president, OEM sales, at Citrix. “Virtualisation is key to providing a cost-effective, efficient and future-proof data centre, and XenServer has been key to helping Tesco achieve its ambitions for a virtualised environment that supports mission-critical systems.”

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